His face, as she cast her eyes upon it, sent a thrill of horror through her nerves. Its beauty of contour and proportion was not so altered that she could not recognize it at once, and yet the change, the pallor, the attenuation! . . . Olivia did her best to conceal a visible tremor, and succeeded. She went nearer to the bed and took the hand that Adrian stretched out to her. Its clasp was burningly feverish. His exquisite brown eyes seemed to devour her face as she paused close beside him.

"Leave me with Mrs. Delaplaine, mother," he said, suddenly making this appeal. "Remember your agreement."

I had no idea until yesterday that you were ill."

"No?" he responded. His eyes dwelt upon hers as though some fascination compelled the searching intensity of their survey. "I wanted mother to send for you; I wanted it so much! But she kept putting me off. At length I made up my mind to do a certain thing, for I had lost all patience, and I suspected that she was deceiving me with false promises. If she did not send for you this very day I had determined to give her a fright-for she loves me, notwithstanding her tame and gloomy way of showing it."

"I'd have told her the blunt truththat I'm dying, and that if she kept us apart any further length of time she would be merely hastening the end for me."

Yes; it is true.

"No, no, no," Olivia murmured. "You cannot mean that, Adrian!" She laughed as cheerily as she could, though her heart had begun to beat in a sickening way. I made the doctor tell me yesterday. He is a clever man, Dr. Wallace; he saw that I was in earnest, and that no prevarication would avail with me. Mother thinks that because my mind wanders, now and then, while I 'm lying here as weak as a little child, it's my brain. But it is not. It's my heart. Dr. Wallace says so. There's no hope for me; it's what they call an atrophy, a wasting away. It followed the fever; I had typhoid, you know, for months Is n't it strange that I should die from that?-a heart that is starving? I used to feel as if my heart were starving when I looked at you in those other days."

"Oh, Adrian!" Olivia faltered, drooping her head.

"I did. But all that is past, now. I had resolved not to speak of it when you came. You knew that I loved you. It was torture for me to see him treat you as he did. I shall never forget that last evening at dinner. When I left you, a little later, after you had fainted, you believed (did you not?) that I had left for town?"

"Yes."

"It was not true. I staid in the village all the next day. The next night I went back to Greenacre. My thoughts all day had been horrible. It seemed to me at times as if your very life were in peril from him. As I said, the next night went back to Greenacre."

He appeared purposely to emphasize that last iterated sentence. He spoke in a low voice-almost too low for his mother, if she had chosen the part of eavesdropper, to have heard him. Speaking doubtless fatigued him, and at times a glossy light would replace the richer and sweeter lustre of his eyes. He was too sick a man to talk as much as this. Olivia was

about to tell him so, and gently bid him to exert himself less, when his repetition of those words, the next night I went back to Greenacre," somehow made her forget her designed injunction.

(6 Do you mean that you went there and asked for me?" she inquired.

Adrian closed his eyes for a moment, and a smile of the most ironical sadness broke from his lips and slowly faded there.

"No; I did not ask for you. I asked for no one. It was some time after dark. The night was very warm, as you perhaps remember."

time that she had done so, going straight upstairs, I had withdrawn into a corner of the dim-lit hall. If she had turned and discovered me I suppose she would have screamed and taken me for a robber. and then I should not have done the thing that freed you from him forever."

"What thing?" questioned Olivia, with her breath coming in gasps. A terror had begun to creep icily through her veins, but it was a terror somehow mixed with wild gladness.

66

The front doors were open; the light from the hall shone out across the piazza upon the lawn, where it joined the full, splendid moonlight. I did not know of Delaplaine's illness, but I felt sure I would not encounter him, as a closer view of the piazza told me he was not there, and I had observed that since his state had become so enfeebled he moved about very little. But I believed that I might see you, and I wanted very much to see you. I had been racked by the most forcible pity for you. I longed to press your hand in farewell, and assure you that if you needed my presence hereafter you had only to telegraph me and I would obey the call without an instant of delay All looked lonely and deserted as I ascended the piazza. If I had met a servant I would have sent a message to you. But even after passing into the hall I met no one whatever. Then the idea occurred to me of going upstairs to your sitting-room. Perhaps you would be there alone, and on such a warm night your door might be open. That would be better, I speedily decided, than to ring the bell for a servant and send up my name to you, thus risking the fact of my presence being made known to him

Well, so I mounted the stairs and soon found myself in the upper hall. As I passed your husband's bed-room the door was slightly ajar. You were speaking with an attendant, and before I had realized it I had heard all you said and all she said. I even caught a glimpse, too, of the man who lay there, and understood clearly that he must be very ill. . . The woman soon left the room, and by the

something held me back. I was thinking of the poison in that glass; I was thinking of how it could rid you of him forever."

"Presently he called you. You went in to him again. I heard those horrible words he spoke to you about wanting to have you die when he died. I was on the verge of rushing in when he grasped your hand like that; but I stood still outside there, instead, and felt my hate of him and my compassion for you mingle and surge through my veins. Then he spoke of his thirst and of how he wanted a glassful of water as large as that of the medicine you were giving him. You told him it was a deadly poison, and after he had taken a spoonful of it you left the glass on the table at his side, because you were most probably agitated by those other words of his, warning you not to be too sure that he would die, after all-you who would not have retarded his detestable life by one second for all the wealth of all the world! . . Then he told you to turn down the light, and you did, and left him . . . And then my mind was made up, and I waited my chance."

"Your chance?"

"It came almost at once. He said, presently, in a husky voice, which you were too far off to hear, 'Oh, how thirsty I am!' And then I did not wait any longer. I went into the dark room, softly, on tiptoe. He did not see me enter. I glided up toward the head of the bed, too much beyond him for him to have seen me, even if the room had not been in such thick shadow. I

reached for the glass on the little table. 'Here 's water,' I said, and the voice I spoke in startled me; it was very faint, but it was so shrewd a copy of just the way you would have spoken those two words. He put out his hand in the gloom, and I gave him the glass. I heard him begin to drink, with the sound a very thirsty child might give . . And then I did not stop even to see if he would put the glass back on the table or let it fall. . I shot away, and no one saw me dart downstairs and hurry out upon the lawn again. The news of his death came to me here in town. I dare say the illness would have attacked me anyway . I don't know. But I began to suffer fearfully for what I had done, and-and when the news also reached me that you had admitted his death was owing to your own carelessness in leaving the medicine.so near him, I had a sick sort of dread lest you might -might be reproaching yourself withthe-thought-"

These latter words were broken painfully, and uttered with a difficulty that seemed to indicate the approach of death itself. But extreme exhaustion, not death, was now at work with Adrian. In another moment his eyes had closed, and his ghastly face, turned a little sideways on the pillow, revealed his complete loss of consciousness

Olivia rose from her chair. For a slight space of time she forgot even to cry out and summon the assistance of Mrs. Etherege. A single thought dominated her being. She was not guilty, after all! Heavy bonds were falling from her spirit, and as if with the audible noise of shattered chains. Darkness was flying away from her, struck into a hundred cloudy fragments by shafts of poignant, enrapturing sunshine! "Thank God!-thank God!" broke from her lips. and as the words escaped her she seemed to gaze upon the very face of Massereene, as though it had become visible in the flesh close at her side. But she discerned it through a blur of besieging tears; and when, a little later, she hurried to find Adrian's mother, these tears were streaming down her cheeks as though the bitterest grief and not the most impassioned joy had caused them.

A few hours later she sat alone in her own room. An open letter lay before her, sheet after sheet, with the ink scarcely dry on the last one. It was to Massereene. It told him everything-the entire story of her temptation, her selfloathing, her renunciation of all future individual delights--and it confessed that the love she bore him was chief and paramount among those delights. Then it recorded the meeting with Adrian Etherege and the new, dizzying revelation that had come to her from his lips.

"Even if I should never see you again and that is now for you to decide-" the letter here went on, “I implore you to keep as an absolute secret what I have just written. But I know your merciful heart-and Adrian is a dying man! His sin has been terrible; I feel that I can judge somewhat of its magnitude by the anguish that its consequences have cost me. There is no other living soul except yourself to whom I would have told his unhappy story. I wonder if it is selfish of me to feel that you must know the whole truth

that it is only justice to myself for such completeness of knowledge to be given you. . As I said, Adrian Etherege will not live long; you already may read on his face that he is doomed. Explain it as you will, but I cannot help a feeling of infinite gratitude toward him. Still, in any case I would have promised his mother very liberal help, both before his death and afterward

Olivia directed her letter, sealed it, and sent it to the hotel at which Massereene always lived when in New York.

Will he come to me?' she asked herself.

Massereene, seated in his own room at the hotel, received two letters. He took them both carelessly, opened one and read in it that the particular stateroom which he desired on a certain steamer sailing a few days from then would be reserved for him . . . Then he glanced at the other envelope and gave a great start. His recognition of the hand-writing set his nerves quivering with excitement . . . About fifteen minutes afterward he came down stairs with unwonted speed, almost threw himself into a cab, and gave orders to be driven to West Tenth Street.

"Foolish child!" he said to Olivia, after the first and almost silent ecstasy of their meeting had passed; "why should you not have told me your trouble before, when it was tormenting your soul? I would have convinced you that your sin (no matter what may have been its result) was far less unpardonable than you believed."

"Nothing could have so convinced me," said Olivia. She drew away from him with a little shiver, though his encircling arms would not let her recede far. "I have misgivings even now," she went on, "that I am absolving myself much too easily."

"Yes."

He laughed. Well, I'll own to the responsibility, my dearest, and not be toc ambitious about increasing it."

Olivia drew a long sigh. "Responsibility?" she murmured. "My sense of a great, one will never cease while I live; for I shall always see reproachful proofs of my weakness in the strength which ought to have made it self-control."

"And I," he replied, still playfully, "shall always hope for strength to grapple with your hardiest metaphysics, and repress them when they take too morbid an outlook."

But she shook her head forbiddingly at this lighter mood of his, even while she drooped closer to him and let his arms more fondly enwrap her; for with all her ever-to-be-endured regret, she could not but love the levity that his happiness forced from him,-and as naturally as the dawn itself will force a dewy glitter from those grasses that its first beams have bathed!

JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY was essentially a painter of dowagers. The Tory feeling of the British colonies before the Revolutionary War, and during the time it was in progress, is well embodied in his portraits. The ladies and gentlemen whom he put on canvas were believers in the divine right of kings, and scorned the republican rabble. Copley's methods were somewhat formal, and he lacked artistic as well as social ease of manner; but one has a suspicion that an unconscious reactionary tendency against the leveling opinions of the age lurks in every dry, hard stroke of the royalist painter's brush. He was not free from colonialism, and his early seekings after truth, alone and unaided, on the "wild shores of America," influenced even his latest works.

Some of Copley's biographers claim that he had no teacher but Nature and himself until he went to Italy and

England. His son, Lord Lyndhurst, the celebrated jurist and High Chancellor of England, shares this opinion. But Dunlap, whose chronicles of early American art have a classic value, thinks that he was probably a pupil of the elder Smybert, who was settled at Boston.

Smybert merits attention, not only as a painter, but as an important figure in the romance of early American history. He was the friend of that Bishop Berkeley, whose famous line, "Westward the course of empire takes its way," has become the literary key-note of American national development. He met Berkeley in Italy, and together they came to America to carry out the bishop's great scheme of founding a university in Rhode Island, for which the English crown had agreed to make a grant. That experiment in socialistic intellectualism budded never to flower, because the money was appropriated for another

purpose by the English government. Bishop Berkeley returned to Ireland, and Smybert was led by fate to Boston, where he painted portraits and exerted a developing influence over a group of young men with artistic tastes, the most promising of whom was Copley.

He was known as a portrait-painter as early as 1760, and for fourteen years he practiced his profession in his native land, and took high rank among colonial artists. He was living at Cambridge, Mass., when he married Miss Anne Clarke, daughter of a merchant of Boston; and we learn that on the occasion of his marriage he wore a suit of crimson velvet with gold buttons. There was no bohemianism about Copley. Having the respectability of a bourgeois and the tastes of an aristocrat, he was admirably fitted to seize and portray the characteristics of the American merchants.

Copley himself was an epitome of the social conditions of the period just preceding the Revolutionary War. The freedom of intercourse which prevailed in the infant colonies when high and low were banded together for the mutual protection of house and home had vanished. Its place was taken by a strong class-feeling among the wealthy and a bitter sense of division, which was soon to find expression in the royalist and republican parties. It is to this period, when Copley's American reputation as a portrait-painter was at its height, that we may assign his picture of Mrs. Peter Turner.

Mrs. Turner, who sits with so respectable and dignified an air in her armchair in this portrait of her, was not a Philadelphian by birth. She was a Miss Sarah Wally, of London. Peter Turner was also a Londoner. He came to America in 1742, and purchased a tract of land in the city of Philadelphia, beyond where Girard College now stands. It was named "Islington Farm," and was situated on "Turner's Lane," now called Turner Street. The three sons of this admirable couple, who brought the traditions of the English gentry with them to America, have handed the family name down to the present day.

The portrait of Mr. Peter Turner was also painted by Copley, but it was not

shown at the recent Philadelphia exhibition. It is probable that one of the sons is that little priggish boy who leans on Mrs. Turner's lap, holding up a rose like a cabbage for her admiration, and resting the other hand on an enormous three-cornered hat-which was doubtless the proper head-covering for the sober little gentlemen of his day. Mrs. Turner is evidently inculcating lessons of piety into the youthful breast. The expression of her countenance is appropriately composed; she holds a book with one hand, and with the other points a moral for the benefit of the young. Copley painted better portraits than this, but we may doubt if he ever painted one more thoroughly in harmony with the spirit of social respectability which informed eighteenth-century Philadelphia.

Sally McKean was a belle of Philadelphia toward the end of the last century. In the portrait that Gilbert Stuart painted of her, she looks determined to make the most of life and enjoy herself as best she may. There is a shrewd, humorous twinkle in her audacious black eyes, which shows a thoroughly American appreciation of her own matrimonial success. She is a marchioness, and her son is a duke and a grandee of Spain! No colonial gallant was good enough for Sally McKean, say her spiteful mates at levee or ball. O, no-she must have a title!

And, indeed, why should she not, gay and handsome as she is, with her father one of the political leaders of Philadelphia and a valued servant of the new republic? Judge McKean was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, president of Congress, chiefjustice of Pennsylvania for twenty years, governor of Pennsylvania and governor of Delaware. The maiden name of the mother of this clever young creature was Armitage, of Newcastle, Del. She was the second wife of Judge McKean. Pretty Sally was born to a commanding position, even in a small colonial way. No wonder she aspired to a high place in life, such as only European society could give; and when that brilliant young noble, Carlo Maria Martinez Casa-Yrujo, appeared above the social horizon, among all the belles of Philadelphia it was